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Saturday, January 14, 2012

The Emerging 'Open Source' Industry & Mega-Companies

Speaking of new companies and job growth - senior executives, politicians, economist, and investors pay attention. Hundreds of major open source companies have been established and are now succeeding in the 'Open Source' Health, Education, Publishing, and other industries. Think Alfesco, Red Hat, KitWare, MedSphere, Black Duck, Google, Eucalyptus, Mirth, Canonical, Pentaho, JasperSoft and many more [not to mention well established companies like IBM and Oracle also playing in this space].See COSI Open Solutions.

Open source software has had a revolutionary impact on the software industry. With the success and ubiquity of open source projects, most enterprise and commercial software development teams now mix open source with internal code to shorten software development schedules and save on the development costs. See BlackDuck Open Source ROI

The latest reports from Gartner, Forrester, Cenatic, and many other news and industry research organizations all point to the continuing growth of the open source marketplace. In fact, Red Hat recently became the first open source software company to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue, a watershed moment for the global open source business community. See COSI Open Business Studies & Reports.

Open source software has obtained a significant share of several markets, such as web servers, server operating systems, desktop operating systems, web browsers, databases, e-mail and other IT infrastructure solutions. A major driving force behind the adoption and growth of open source solutions in the U.S. has been the emergence and growth of open source software product and service providers with a profitable, sustainable economic model. See Cenatic Report on International Use of Open Source Software – 2010

It would seem the time is right to start building more 'mega' companies in this space like Red Hat. Companies in the Open Source, especially in the Open Health, Open Education, and Open Publishing space, are ripe for the picking with potential growth as far as the eye can see. What do you think is going to happen?

A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. found that more than half of organizations surveyed have adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions. See Gartner Report

Looking forward to your comments and a 'heads up' about any major movements in this arena.